formula one is formula fun

“The way we’ve done it gives the player the maximum freedom to manage a Formula 1 team,” says game director Lee Mather. “If we were to put you behind the scenes of Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, the restrictions would be far more significant.

“You wouldn’t be able to do things with sponsors, the colour of the car, the livery. There’s so much that would be taken away because that is an official team, and it wouldn’t be Formula 1 if we started changing the colours of those teams and the way they are structured.”

It’s a fair compromise: in exchange for a huge amount of freedom, you have to stay with your fledgling F1 operation, which takes the 11th slot on the F1 grid. But you’re in full control of the look of the team and its colour scheme and branding. To make sure that flexibility doesn’t get affected by real world conflicts, the sponsors you negotiate with for your team aren’t real, but that saves the bother of Codemasters having to explain why you can’t be sponsored by rivals such as Petronas and Shell, and make their logos purple.

“Large brands have very strong guidelines around how you use their logos, colours, placement, and all of those things would take away a large amount of the gameplay for us,” says Mather. “We wanted to make sure the player had the ability to customise their sponsors, place them where they want and with whatever colour scheme they want.

“And we want to be able to attach sensible goals, values and payments to those sponsors. By using fictional sponsors that gave us much more versatility. Keeping a real driver as your team-mate and keeping the real engine suppliers were the main things for us.”

Using a real-world engine supplier ties in with a new R&D feature that crosses over into the driver career as well. As an engine customer, if your supplier brings an engine upgrade for its works team, your team will benefit from that as well.

The amount of money you receive from your first primary sponsor, and what you spend on an engine, determines how much you have left to sign a driver to be your team-mate in the beginning. And with all 2020 F1 line-ups locked in, you’ll be choosing a driver from the Formula 2 grid to get you started.

As time passes in the game you can try to poach F1 drivers from rival teams, but it’s not simply about saving up enough money to afford Lewis Hamilton’s salary. If you haven’t upgraded your facilities to a level that can convince a top driver you can give them a front-running car, they won’t go anywhere near you.

It’s possible to train and develop drivers in My Team, so you could turn an F2 protege into the real deal if you put the effort in. But if you run your team irresponsibly even F2 drivers could be off limits, and you’ll find yourself fishing around in the pool of drivers Codemasters created to race the classic cars that feature in each game.

“The fallback drivers are notoriously poor compared with the real-world drivers, so you’ll find yourself languishing at the back,” says Mather, who adds that you can temporarily close down departments of your team to save money, but that will lead to your car falling even further off the pace. So watch those pennies.

There’s no option to bail out of driving entirely and sign two drivers to your team, so your actions in the driver market will only ever be related to finding a team-mate to race alongside you. But the team boss role is likely to make you approach the way you race your team-mate.

...My Team is anchored by a timeline, and the priority is working out how to allocate the time available to you between races. You can choose to focus on car development programmes, which will look familiar to those used to the R&D part of the driver career mode, or use days up for driver training, merchandise, sponsor appearances or media activities. As well as the four core departments of aerodynamics, chassis, powertrain and durability, My Team also features personnel and marketing departments that you’ll also have to upgrade.

All of these facilities in your F1 factory are represented visually in the game, featuring your chosen branding with noticeable differences in their look depending on how advanced each facility is.